It’s been two years since Dmytro Shymkiv developed the ambitious Strategy 2020 program, which includes a set of key performance indicators that Ukraine plans to achieve by the decade’s end.
Although few of the indicators have budged much since they were set in 2014, Shymkiv, deputy head of President Petro Poroshenko’s administration and secretary of the National Reforms Council, is not giving up.
He is one of many Ukrainians from the private sector who came into government on a wave of patriotism and optimism following the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014.
Not many of them are left now – their numbers shrinking from disappointment at the lack of progress. Shymkiv says reform efforts have been stalled by disagreements at all levels, by bureaucracy and by an immature political discourse that favors populism over solutions.
“I was a romantic,” says Shymkiv. “I thought that all the middle-level officials would come to believe in the ideals of the Maidan, and would be helping us.”
Still, he thinks that setting an ambitious goal — like getting into the top 30 in World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking and doubling national wealth were the right thing to do.
“The goals need to be high,” says Shymkiv. “A country needs a vision.”
So far, his philosophy of setting high goals has worked well for him. In 2009, when Shymkiv was the CEO of Microsoft Ukraine, he set a goal for his team to become the best Microsoft office globally – a competition that is held each year. He won the coveted title two years later.
Setting goals for a nation, however, has proved to be a different story.
High goals, low results
It took less than three months for a team of six people, including Shymkiv, to draft the Strategy 2020 in 2014. They considered many performance indicators and chose 25. Early in 2016, Shymkiv’s team put together a report on the strategy’s progress in 2015. It compared the performance indicators to the starting point in 2014, and the ultimate goals to be attained by 2020.
One of the most important indicators, gross domestic product per capita, is one of the biggest disappointments. Standing at $8,508 in 2014, it rose to just $8,666 in 2015. The goal, set in Strategy 2020, is for it to reach $16,000 by 2020.
Shymkiv admits that setting this goal so high was very ambitious, and a lower number had been considered. But he decided to go for $16,000 after he saw that GDP in Belarus was an impressive $17,000 in 2014. “I said – wait, are you telling me that in six years we won’t even be at the level of today’s Belarus?” he said. “That’s impossible.”
Shymkiv blames sluggish GDP growth on economic decisions, especially the stalling of privatization of big enterprises and failure to push ahead with deregulation.
President Poroshenko, according to Shymkiv, fully supports the Strategy 2020 program. Asked why, then, the strategy’s performance indicators are lagging, when the president has an ally as prime minister, and a majority in parliament, Shymkiv shakes his head and makes a face. His look conveys the impression that the president is constrained by other powers
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Getting bills through parliament is tough and Shymkiv sometimes has to lobby lawmakers personally.
The immaturity of the political process frustrates him. When he drew up Strategy 2020, he thought it would become a goal that would unite the country’s politicians, and that they would compete to draft the best plan to achieve its goals.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, battle lines were drawn between power-hungry political opponents, who offer no solutions, but operate in the realm of populism. Shymkiv is visibly annoyed when he speaks about how politicians promise things like “no one will be poor” without attempting to back up their promises with a plan.
“Guys, you can’t be throwing mud at each other forever,” Shymkiv says emotionally, addressing imaginary politicians in front of him. “It’s time to sit at one table and start taking decisions.”
Small successes
When the strategy was first presented, experts and representatives of business criticized Shymkiv for planning to devote 3 percent of GDP to defense spending. In 2014, it stood at 1 percent.
“They were saying it was way too much,” says Shymkiv. “But we looked at the experience of the countries that are under a constant military threat, like Israel, or Oman.”
It proved the easiest goal to achieve: A year after the strategy was set, military spending has already surpassed 3 percent of GDP, thanks to Russia’s war.
Another of Shymkiv’s decisions that set him up for criticism was adding a section of cultural indicators — like increasing the number of movies produced in Ukraine or setting the number of medals to be won by athletes at the 2020 Olympic Games. Shymkiv argues that such indicators are an essential part of the country’s future and had to be included.
Next decade
Even though the 2020 vision plan is far from being achieved, Shymkiv is thinking about writing a follow-up – Strategy 2030. He is in the process of deciding who he wants to work on it with him. “This time it will be different: We will include a lot more people in the development of this strategy,” he says.
Vision, not a plan
Shymkiv stresses that Strategy 2020 is merely a sign helping Ukraine to reach its destination.
“We were tempted to work out a detailed plan,” Shymkiv said, but added that he wanted to give politicians a chance to offer their solutions to make the final plan everyone’s plan.
So far, there is no unified, step-by-step plan for making sure that the goals for Strategy 2020 are reached.
When asked if a middle-level ministry employee would be able to name some of the strategy’s main indicators if someone cared to quiz him, Shymkiv said with a chuckle: “No, he wouldn’t know them. But he would know that there is a strategy.”
